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People create races, not nature. Different societies tend to have different systems of racial categorization. Even within the same society, there can be significant changes in racial categorization over time. We can get a sense of this from the fact that U.S. Census Bureau has made changes to the rules for racial classification system in nearly every census.

The guidelines for the 1940 Census (the full data of which was recently released to the public) instructed enumerators that “any mixtures of white and nonwhite blood” should be classified as nonwhite. Additionally, people of “mixed Negro and Indian blood should be reported as Negro” while “other mixtures of nonwhite parentage should be reported according to the race of the father.” These rules only make sense when embedded in the specific U.S. political economy of slavery and Jim Crow.

Over the past few decades, the United States has seen a significant increase in the Latino population. Many of these Latinos are immigrants from other countries with other systems of identity and racial classification. These systems of classification may be in conflict with the official directives of the Census Bureau.

According to the Census Bureau, being Hispanic or Latino is an ethnic classification, not a racial classification. For perhaps as much as half of the Latino population, however, Latino is a racial category. A new survey from the Pew Hispanic Center illustrates this fact. When asked “Which of the following describes your race?”, 25 percent of Latinos answered “Hispanic or Latino.” Another 26 percent chose “Some other race”–rejecting the Census-Bureau-recognized racial categories of “white,” “black,” and “Asian.” While some of these “Some other races” may have been looking for “American Indian,” it is doubtful that all or even a majority of them were. They were looking for some racial category that the Census Bureau does not offer.

For many Latinos, “Latino” is understood as a racial category or as something other than an ethnic category in the sense that the Census Bureau intends. The idea of a cultural racial category is not an uncommon one. Nazi Germany, notoriously, institutionalized the category of a Jewish race. In Japan, there is the idea of a Japanese race which would distinguish them not only from non-Asian groups, but from other Asians as well. Groups that are conceptualized as cultural in the United States can be conceptualized as racial elsewhere.

The Pew Hispanic Center survey shows us that many Latinos see their group as something akin to a racial group. But the survey does not tell us how non-Latinos perceive and classify ​Latinos. Do non-Latinos perceive Latinos to be a separate race, an ethnic group, or something else? Latinos’ future in the United States depends not only on how they perceive themselves, but also on how others perceive, classify, and ultimately treat them. One hopes that a future Pew Hispanic Center survey will ask these questions.

American Hispanics are White, Black, Asian, of Meso American Ancestry and any number of mixtures therefrom. Many Hispanics are often peeved at the notion that they are something other than white because they feel it is a means of categorizing and excluding them from mainstream acceptance. Indeed, while many Mexicans, who comprise the great majority of Hispanics in this country, are cognizant of the fact that they are distinct from the “white” denizens that have moved into their lands over centuries, they do not always concede the term ‘white’ to them often relegating them to “Anglos” many Mexicans are wholly or majority of Latin European stock and refuse to be racially pigeonholed. This is even more so with Cubans and even Puerto Rican the next two largest Hispanic groups, Cuban emigres have a high degree of European ancestry and often consider themselves white, many are indignant over categorization as non white. This is to a lesser degree perhaps with Puerto Ricans who often display a nationalist bent.